To give you a sneak preview of some of the most insightful topic s at this year's Africa HR Leaders conference,please find below extracts of some selected presentations.

This web page will be constantly updated till the event so please check in for more topics and insights!

Title of Presentation: From Engagement to Experience: Best Practices on How to use Employee Insights

Brief: High performance organizations have always been proactive in capturing employee feedback to better understand their business, culture and customers via surveys or other means. From satisfaction to engagement to employee experience, employee listening is evolving and increasingly dynamic, agile and flexible. With the digitization of the workplace, managing the volume of data and extracting meaningful insights is more challenging.

Organizations who succeed in managing complex feedback programs leverage recent advances in cloud and cognitive computing, behavioral science and big data. In this presentation, we will share IBM point of view on employee listening, employee experience and people analytics.

Key Bullet Points of Presentation

build an engagement strategy for the 21st century

learn how to get more insights from your survey programs

stay up-to date on best practices and technology for employee listening and analytics

Title of Presentation: Workplace Fraud - Challenges of Modern Technology for Effective HR Practices

Brief:

Human resource professionals play an important role in reducing workplace fraud. Business risks associated with employees continue to affect business integrity and profitability. Industry analysis suggests insider related theft, embezzlement, unlawful access to confidential corporate information, corporate espionage, fraud and other operational breaches remain key business risks affecting corporate organizations. Accordingto the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ (ACFE) Report to the Nations on Occupational fraud and abuse, a study analysed 2,410 occupational fraud cases that caused a total loss of more than $6.3 billion.

In Ghana, integrity of employees has dominated major corporate security and investigations and businesses are being urged to address issues relative to these emerging challenges. Technology driven crimes such as email fraud, network compromises, phishing attacks, credit card fraud, data leakages, among others exist within organizations as employees remain the “weakest links” in today’s technology driven working environment. These issues are critical to the objectives of this year’s edition of the OML Africa HR Leaders Conference which amongst others will focus on “how the HR department can streamline HR administration through HR technology such as software, outsourcing and electronic systems.”

The presentation will focus on the following:

Highlights of fraud incidents and cases involving insiders and employees.

Modus operandi and employee fraud schemes in the technology facilitated working environment.

Vulnerabilities of organizations and employees within the working environment.

Internal Control & HR Management lapses that result in workplace fraud.

4 Masterclasses

3 Panel Discussions

Using Social Media for Pre-Employment Checks: HR in the Public Sector-The Issues, Solutions and the Future; and more

2 HR Clinics-ask the experts your ailing HR problems

Title of presentation - Wellness in the Workplace: The Proactive Approach

Brief

Wellness in the workplace embraces all aspects of programs and activities designed to ensure that workers are not just productive, but also in a balanced state of health and wellbeing that guarantee continuous and sustained performance. The learning outcomes at the end of the presentation will include but not limited to:

Appreciation of indicators of wellness in the workplace

Benefits of wellness in the workplace to workers and employers

Factors that promote wellness in the workplace

Proactive approaches to wellness in the workplace

The roles of HR structures in wellness promotion

Speaker: Dapo Omolade, Managing Consultant, Hybrid HSE-DGM

Title of Presentation: Low Cost Learning and Employee Development for the Changing Workforce

Brief:

The business environment is experiencing rapid changes influencing the workforce. The human resource practice and management has evolved rapidly in the past fifteen years than ever. New technologies, economic crises and geopolitical turmoil have impacted businesses and employees in various ways. Social media and the ways of engaging with the masses have added to the complexity of challenges but also the myriad of opportunities to engage in more meaningful ways across various age groups. Currently there are four generations living together and trying to adapt to the ever-changing business needs. All in all it is an ideal time to reassess your workforce and how you can engage them.

What does this mean for workforce learning and development? As Patty Woolcock, the executive director of CSHRP, the California Strategic HR Partnership, says: “The future of learning is three ‘justs’: just enough, just-in-time, and just-for-me.” It means that training is going to have to be just as agile as the workforce — where speed, flexibility, and innovation are key. It means that more learning will happen in teams, and on platforms where training can be delivered any time, any place, at the user’s convenience.

Learning outcomes

1. Ways of effectively and efficiently train today’s workforce.

Monitoring employee training needs during Appraisal.

How technology is assisting HR integrate and monitor learning and development.

Attracting candidates and retaining current employees is a lot like attracting and retaining customers. Making the right investments with focus on quality of hire helps organization improve return in investments.

In this session, IBM will share the revolutionary step it has taken in talent acquisition, offering comprehensive and integrated recruiting solutions that are rooted in behavioral science and designed to attract, engage, hire and onboard the right talent.

You will learn about strategies to reduce cost of hiring with solutions to incorporate precision into the equation, remove guesswork from the recruitment process and better equip you to predict fit, and performance before you hire.

Title of Presentation: Dealing with difficult people – Using Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Resources

Brief:

One of life’s certainties, no matter who and where we are, is the fact that we will be required to relate to other people. For this reason, it is necessary for us to learn to get on with people who we would otherwise not care much for. Although we cannot be friends with everyone, it is to our benefit to find peace or at least have the ability to deal with people cordially, especially in the workplace and even more so, when they are ‘difficult’ people – and there lies the problem. Would the way we feel about them change if the way we adjusted the label we give them or our perception of their behavior? How can we learn to get along when we struggle to see eye to eye.

Learning outcomes:

How to really put yourself in another’s shoes

Re-labelling theory

The power of a reframe to change what you see

Destination: desired outcomes

Masterclass: The Do’s and Don’ts of Preparing for Labour Commission Hearing

Brief

With the number of labour commission claims continuing to rise each year, the possibility of having to prepare for and attend a labour commission hearing is a harsh reality for many employers. The thought of attending a hearing as a witness or an HR professional supporting managers can be daunting.

Therefore, it is important for HR leaders to learn the intricacies of preparing for a labour commission hearing and understanding the process from the law perspective. Ignorance of law is not considered in the court of lawor at the labour commission. Labour laws are the backbone for human resource management. Without the involvement of labour law there is no human resource management.

There is no validity for human resource management without following the labour laws. At the conference this year, Dr Mrs. Welbeck shall walk us through a Masterclass on how to prepare for a hearing, the do’s and don’ts as well as explain the process in accordance to the Ghana Labor Act 2003 (Act 651).

These practical tips and guidelines using case studies are a must have and a must know.

We are increasingly deriving insights from data to help our clients make better talent decisions. The use of data analytics is advancing from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics is the most basic form, providing the hindsight view of what happened and laying the foundation for turning data into information. More advanced uses are predictive analytics, providing insights and foresights (advanced forecasts and the ability to model future results) and prescriptive analytics(the high level of analytics that leverage machine learning techniques to both interpret data and recommend actions).

Traditional HR analytics has been very much focused on the present, that is, items such as turnover, cost per hire, but predictive analytics, seek to look into the future and answer questions like, “What will turnover be like in 3 years?” and, “What should we do today to manage that predicted turnover to ensure future competitiveness in the talent war?“Yes, HR predictive analytics is boldly going where no HR person has been before.

If HR wants to remain commercially relevant, it needs to be able to provide senior executives with a predictive analytics based justification for its key talent related decisions.

At the Conference this year, you wll be experience a class on talent assessments and predictive analytics focusing on the second most important area for the CEO performance management more importantly talent forecasting, being able to predict which new hires, based on their profile, are likely to be high fliers and then moving them in to your high potential programs.

According to Daft and Lane (2013), an organization is not a building or a set of policies and procedures; organizations are made up of people and their relationships with one another. An organization exists when people interact with one another to perform essential functions that help attain goals. An organization is a means to an end (Daft and Lane, 2013).

With a focus on performance management, this paper seeks to trigger a discussion on how this process can drive business growth and industry leadership.

Performance management is the function of HR which can be described as the process through which line managers and supervisors share their expectations, goals, performance objectives for their teams to have an understanding of the organisational targets and functional targets and how their individual and team work contribute to the overall achievement of these targets.

In the same vein, the performance management process is the vehicle for sharing feedback, identifying learning and development areas and opportunities as well as allowing for the evaluation of performance results against the set targets. Performance management is that organisational tool that is used to differentiate performance through processes such as compensation and benefits and recognition in the organisation.

The foundation and success of performance management is using a tool that captures the essence of performance i.e., the targets that an individual should work to achieve during the year and the specific organisational behaviours that the individual must demonstrate in working to achieve their objectives.

This discussion aims to holistically review the performance management culture which offers practical solutions to the 21st century enterprise.

Speaker: Dr Hazel Berrad Amuah, Head of HR, Old Mutual

Title of presentation: The Future of Talent: How African businesses can compete successfully and sustainably

Brief:The Heartbeat of any business is its Talent! It has been proven beyond all sentiments that the level of success an organization achieves, is dependent on the quality of talents working in and for it. We realise that as organizations strive to increase revenue, achieve cost-effective operations, grow market-share and enhance brand image; talent becomes the differentiating factor.

Therefore, CEOs and HR leaders are saddled with the important responsibility of figuring out the complexity of Talent Management. Their greatest worry becomes how to access, attract, inspire, deploy, build, optimize and engage the right kind of talent to achieve their vision and business goals.

Many decision-making Executives of African businesses have nightmares over talent issues; and so, they conveniently push the bulk to their HR leaders who sometimes do not even have a clue, on how to drive a value-based Talent Management system. It gets more complicated in our present-day Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) business terrain.

The landscape of business is going through a revolution that is unprecedented. We see how systems of market have become inter-woven and supply chains are now webs. Business models are changing the way value is being created for consumers. Super computers and intelligent robots are now replacing skilful human beings.

Digital technology is empowering small businesses to better compete with giant corporations for market share. Big Data is gaining more converts, as organizations seek to make better informed and data-intelligent business decisions. African businesses need to understand how all these shape their existence.

The talent implication of this is that, Talent Management will be re-defined to meet the demands of a VUCArised business world. For African business to compete successfully and sustainably, their talent agenda will need to be forged to drive the business through these interesting times.

The present VUCA realities are birthing a new future of Talent; and the question is “How can African businesses position to compete in this present and the future to come?

Learning Take-away:

Participants will;

1. Understand how present-day VUCA realities affect the War for Talent

2. Get perspective on the realities that African business face in managing talent

3. Given insight on how peculiarities of our environment and culture affect Talent Management

5. Gain knowledge on how to be proactive and achieve a competitive edge via an adequate Talent Agenda

Speaker: Oluwatayo Opatayo, Group HR, Rainoil, Nigeria

Title of Presentation: Defining the Employee Value Proposition: HR Tool for Attracting Best Talent & Retaining High Fliers

Brief

The discussion on Employee Benefits in Ghana has skewed towards immediate-effect benefits for employees for far too long. Negotiations between labour unions and employers invariably linger around benefits of performance bonus payout, 13th month cheque, salary levels and percentage increases, leave day entitlements, overtime pay levels, per diem and all other instant benefits.

Employee benefits encompass more than these and HR practitioners must be seen to be moving into discussing the broader socio-economic Employee Benefits which employers ought to guarantee their employees. The most rewarding employee benefits tend to provide benefits that cater for the general wellbeing of the employees’ immediate family and most importantly benefits that cater for the future wellbeing of the employee in his/her own lifetime.

The plurality of financial industry players in Ghana is able to collaborate to craft creative and flexible financial solutions to the cure of these conspicuous Employee Benefit needs. Unfortunately, most of our HR practitioners are oblivious of these solutions birthed by collaborations between insurers, banks, asset managers, pension trustees, fund custodians, brokers and reinsurers.

The security of these solutions is relatively guaranteed in the fiduciary relationships between players across different regulatory regimes - NIC, BoG, NPRA, SEC - such that at all times beneficiaries of these benefits have their payouts secured by law.

These are the recent revolutionary HR Value Propositions that employers employ to retain high fliers and attract scarce talent to gain competitive advantage. Incidentally, Ghana’s pensions and financial industry laws provide very tax-generous enticement for both employers and employees to be able actualize the gains of these solutions.

ii. Share knowledge and best practice experiences on Employee Benefits across other markets in Africa and beyond

iii. Provide guidelines to HR practitioners in crafting Employee Value Propositions and articulating same for brand mileage gains for their company iv. Demystify the Employee Benefit incentives of the three-tier pensions system to HR practitioners

Topic: Prevention is better than cure! Introduction into the International Labour Standards

Brief

Every HR manager must know the labour laws of that country where they are working, because most of the core HR functions are linked to the labour laws of concerned country. Managing human resources without following labour laws may be illegal and in some increases it may be serious offence which may lead to litigation or fines.

Every human resource manager should also know the International labour standards and have thorough knowledge about thesestandards. Many of the human resource functions are based on the labour laws and the International labour standards. Critical issues like disputes resolution; women employees’ rules and regulations; child labour; and compensation, in case of accidents etc. are all issues performed according to the labour laws strictly.

The International labour standards is a series of value judgments, set forth to protect basic worker rights, enhance workers’ job security, and improve their terms of employment on a global as well as establish a worldwide minimum level of protection.

Since 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) has maintained and developed a system of international labour standards aimed at promoting opportunities for women and men to obtain decent and productive work, in conditions of freedom, equity, security and dignity. In today's globalized economy, international labour standards are an essential component in the international framework for ensuring that the growth of the global economy provides benefits to all. (Source ILO).

At this year’s conference, Mr Amoasi-Andoh will take us through the International labour standards. He will provide insights into the standards and why all HR leaders need to know and understand the standards.